Saturday, August 18, 2012

Depression Retrospective Compares America
of Thirties to the U.S.
Today

People had it a lot harder and
handled their lot in life a lot better during the Great Depression than folks
do during the current recession, at least that’s the proposition put forth ad
nauseam by Thom Hoffman, the director/narrator of Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar. And why might that be the case? Back in
the Thirties, safety nets like Medicare and Social Security didn’t exist, so
everyone had to man up, lean on each other’s shoulders, and figure a way to
survive without any help from the government.

By
comparison, Hoffman indicts today’s U.S. citizenry for being self-indulgent,
spoiled consumers with an unquenchable thirst for frivolous luxuries. In the
process he places the so-called Greatest Generation up on a pedestal while
indicting the materialist Me Generation for the degeneration of America into a
vast wasteland on the verge of collapse marked by everything from the
disintegration of the family to the gluttonous behavior of the 1%ers on Wall
Street.

While
well-intentioned and at times even thought-provoking, the picture is
unfortunately too simplistic and sloppily slapped together to amount to much
more than the unstructured musings of a curmudgeon nostalgic for a bygone era
when the jobless had to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps instead of being
able to turn to Uncle Sam for food stamps and unemployment checks.

Truth be told, it’s gonna take a
lot more than a little tough love and pounding the pavement to get this country's
economy righted.

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KamWilliams.com

The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.